Robert Willis

“ Servetus would have Œcolampadius instruct him; but the invariable complaint of all with whom he came in contact was that he could never be made to receive instruction; in other words, secure in his own conclusions, he thought his would-be instructors mistaken in theirs. And this, indeed, for good or ill, is characteristic of all who impress their age, and show themselves leaders in art, in science, in policy, or religion. Genius measures with its own rod, and is its own guide on the way it goes. The world is not moved by men who have all they own from teachers. ”

“ In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we now pronounce our final sentence and condemn thee, Michael Servetus, to be bound and taken to Champel, and there being fastened to a stake, to be burned alive, along with thy books, printed as well as written by thy hand, until thy body be reduced to ashes. So shall thy days end, and thou be made an example to others who would do as thou hast done. ”

“ Shall we, we say further, think that the man who was tolerant of the speculative opinions of others, and whose business in life it was to visit the sick and reach the healing potion, was less of a good, and a true, and a useful member of society, than he who aspired through the unseen, the unknown and the unknowable, to rule the world with a rod of iron, who was utterly intolerant of other speculative opinions than his own, and in enforcing his arbitrary rules for the regulation of life and conversation, was merciless in the use of the scourge, the branding iron, the sword, and the slow fire? ”

“ And then, and in addition to all this, there was Monseigneur Paumier to be considered—Paumier, under whose patronage Villeneuve had settled at Vienne and lived so long in the very shadow of the archiepiscopal palace, on terms of intimacy with its distinguished occupant. How should the great man escape suspicion of heresy himself if it were known that he had been living as a friend with one who held all the most holy mysteries of the Roman Religion as mere vanities or inventions of the Devil! ”

“ So sure does Servetus appear to have felt of final acquittal at this time—guiltless of blasphemy as in his soul he knew himself to be, and bolstered by the 451 false hopes of his false friends, that whilst the scales of justice were still trembling on the beam, he, from his filthy cell, in rags, and devoured by vermin, even he aspired to become the accuser of the man by whom he was himself accused, and subjected to all the indignities he endured! ”

“ With no respect for civil liberty himself, and still less for religious liberty beyond the pale of his own narrow confession of faith, Calvin must nevertheless be thought of as the real 514 herald of modern freedom. Holding ignorance to be incompatible with the existence of a people at once religious and free, Calvin had the school-house built beside the church, and brought education within the reach of all. Nor did he overlook the higher culture. He restored the College of Geneva, founded half a century before by a pious and liberal citizen, but utterly neglected in Roman Catholic times ”

“ God, it is true, is in a certain sense the Father of all men as he is of Jesus; but we are his sons by adoption as Jesus is his Son by nature. Jesus, indeed, was believed to be the son of Joseph, but he was truly the Son of God, having, without any sophistry, been engendered of his substance: the Word of God overshadowed the Virgin like a cloud, and acted in her as generative dew, comparable to the shower from heaven that causes the earth to bring forth flowers and fruit. ”

“ The law of Moses was unbearable; it slew the soul, it increased sin, it begat anger; virtue itself through it became at times transgression, and in compassion for our frailty it was annulled. You make God exercise a rude and miserable people in a mill-round. What would you say were some tyrant to require mountains of gold or the stars of heaven from your Genevese, and threaten them with death for non-compliance with his demands? But the Old Law bound men to impossibilities. ”

“ The ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde is indeed a most noteworthy book; full of true piety, resting on the wider and surer grounds of nature at large in harmony with human intelligence, than the dogmatic theologian can show in the written text and unwritten traditions on which he relies for his conclusions. Containing no word that is not thoroughly orthodox, doctrine, nevertheless, is not that which it is the grand object of the ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde to propound. ”

“ We can hardly imagine Calvin to have been so totally devoid of humanity as to have felt no compunctious visitings when he stood face to face with the man whom his persistent enmity alone had brought to such a pass; but he would also have been other than he meets us in history, and otherwise circumstanced than he was as αὐτοκράτωρ—despot of Geneva—had he not felt something of self-gratulation and even of triumph, when pardon was asked of him by his humbled foe. ”

“ The reason usually assigned must have appeared unsatisfactory to an understanding so clear as that of Servetus, when unclouded by fancies of his own creating; but we can hardly think he mends matters by ascribing the origin of sin to heaven and the rebellion of the angels, as he does, instead of to the earth and Adam’s disobedience. Far from maintaining that the heart of man is corrupt and evil by nature, he holds that the cause of good works and well-doing is proper and spontaneous to the individual, who is only answerable for his own sin, not for the sin of another. ”

“ A criminal suit on the ground of a new interpretation of Scripture, as it had been made in fine so clearly to appear, struck reasonable men not only as illogical but as indefensible in a city whose autonomy and entire religious system were founded on a right of the kind assumed by itself. Calvin’s dictum, that Servetus’s purpose was the overthrow of all religion, was not seen to be borne out by the facts of the case when calmly considered, and, to the popular apprehension, was wholly belied by the pious bearing of the man in the last hours of his life. ”

“ If Calvin neither understands the nature of Faith, nor of Justification, we shall not wonder when we find that no more is he credited with comprehending Regeneration, ‘You have not understood true Regeneration, nor the Celestial Kingdom, whereof Faith is the gate. Regeneration, I maintain, comes through baptism; you say that Christ thought nothing of the water. But is it not written that we are born anew by water? and is it not of water that Paul speaks when he designates baptism the Laver of Regeneration, saying, “We are cleansed from sin by washing with water?” ”

“ Who shall say what amount of influence the ‘Restoration of Christianity’ might have had upon both Science and Religion had it been suffered to see the light! For it is not the possession only, but the pursuit of truth that truly ennobles man; and in Servetus’s incomplete induction in the sphere of physics we see the path fairly entered on that has given to modern science all its triumphs. ”

“ Yet has not even this been without its compensating good; for when Calvin—impersonation of relentless rigour—sent the pious Servetus to the flames, it may be said that the knell of intolerance began to toll. Persistence in consigning dissidents from the religious dogmas of the day to death was made henceforth impossible, and persecution on religious grounds to any minor issue has come by degrees to be seen not only as indefensible in principle, but immoral in fact; for it strikes at the root of the very noblest elements in the constitution of humanity—Conscience and Loyalty to Truth. ”

“ Calvin and his sect, we know, set little store by works of charity and mercy. ‘All that men do,’ proceeds our letter-writer, ‘you say is done in sin and is mixed with dregs that stink before God, and merit nothing but eternal death. But therein you blaspheme. Stripping us of all possible goodness you do violence to the teaching of Christ and his Apostles, who ascribe perfection or the power of being perfect to us: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” ”

“ The very air of Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century was alive with mutterings of the storm that had long been gathering, and found vent at length through the manly voice of Martin Luther; and when we find hints that fears of the Inquisition had had something to do with Servetus’s subsequent movements, we are disposed to imagine that the call to free thought which had sprung up on the revival of letters and found out the northern Monk in his cell, had also reached the Friar of the south, and from him flowed over upon the receptive mind of his youthful scholar. ”

“ His two books—the one in manuscript sent to Calvin in confidence six or eight years before for his strictures, and a copy of the one lately printed at Vienne—were then fastened to his waist, and his head was encircled in mockery with a chaplet of straw and green twigs bestrewed with brimstone. The deadly torch was then applied to the faggots and flashed in his face; and the brimstone catching, and the flames rising, wrung from the victim such a cry of anguish as struck terror into the surrounding crowd. ”

“ The printer, a pious and respectable person, when he came to know that the book was a mere farrago of Errors, suppressed the copies he had on hand. It were long did I enumerate the many Errors, the prodigious blasphemies against God, that are scattered over its pages. Imagine to yourselves a rhapsody made up of the impious ravings of every age; for there is no kind of impiety which this wild beast from hell has not appropriated. You will assuredly find in every page matters that will horrify you. ”

“ In the works of the Saintly, I say, there is nothing of the corruption you feign. The works of the Spirit shine before God and before men, and in themselves are good and proper. Thou reprobate and blasphemer, who calumniatest the works of the Spirit—Tu improbus et blasphemus qui opera Spiritus calumniaris!’
Can we wonder at Calvin’s rage with the man who dared to address him in such language as this? On his trial at Geneva Servetus tells his judges that the correspondence between him and the Reformer degenerated by degrees on both sides into mutual recrimination and abuse. ”

“ Servetus as a youth unquestionably received the education that would have fitted him for the Priesthood; and we think complacently of the solace and relaxation from the monotony of monastic life, which the worthy brother we evoke as his principal teacher found in imparting all he knew, and pointing out the onward way to one both apt and eager to learn. Before leaving the convent, or the convent school, where he doubtless remained for several years, Servetus must have been not only a tolerable Latin scholar, but, it may have been, also grounded in Greek and the rudiments of Hebrew. ”

“ Servetus, however, it is said, was a heretic, a blasphemer. But what was Calvin in the eyes of those he had forsaken? The most egregious of heretics, whose teaching had led thousands from the faith of their fathers, and imperilled their salvation; a traitor, too, whose independent principles turned subjects into rebels, and tended to make despotic rule by Priest and King impossible. And this is true; for we are not to overlook the fact that it is to Calvin, with however little purpose on his part, that we mainly owe the large amount of civil and religious liberty we now enjoy. ”

“ From reading the Bible at Toulouse and contrasting the humble life and simple theistic morality of the Prophet of Nazareth with the metaphysical subtleties and dogmatic deductions of the schoolmen, the pomp, the power, the tyranny and the greed of the priests so conspicuously displayed at Bologna, we can readily imagine the impression made on the independent spirit of Servetus—an impression that found more seemly utterance anon than that we have already quoted, and in words like these: ‘For my own part I neither agree nor disagree in every particular with either Catholic or Reformer. ”